Abstract

The task of determining low noise amplifier (LNA) high-frequency performance in functional testing is as
challenging as designing the circuit itself due to the difficulties associated with bringing high frequency signals offchip.
One possible strategy for circumventing these difficulties is to inferentially estimate the high frequency
performance measures from measurements taken at lower, more accessible, frequencies. This paper investigates the
effectiveness of this strategy for classifying the high frequency gain of the amplifier, a key LNA performance parameter.
An indirect Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and direct support vector machine (SVM) classification strategy are
considered. Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations show promising results with both methods, with the indirect MLP
classifiers marginally outperforming SVMs.

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

Research presented in this paper was funded by
Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund (EI
CFTD/2003/304) under the National Development
Plan. The authors gratefully acknowledge this
support.